MANCHESTER
ANTHROPOLOGY
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Social Anthropology
School of Social Sciences
University of Manchester
M13 9PL 
  2

The origins of observational cinema: conversations with Colin Young.1

[To appear in Beate Engelbrecht, ed. Memories of the Origins of Visual

Anthropology. Frankfurt, New York, Bern, Brussels: Peter Lang]

Paul Henley, Department of Social Anthropology/Granada Centre for

Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester
paul.henley@manchester.ac.uk

No one can say for certain exactly when the term 'observational cinema'
became a regular part of the film-makers' standard vocabulary. An early
use in print is said to be an article by Roger Sandall in Sight and Sound in
the early 1970s. However, by general consent the term was already by then
in circulation amongst practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic.
Moreover, by whomever, or whenever the term 'observational cinema' was
first coined, it will be forever associated with the name of Colin Young and
the ethnographic film programme which he played the leading role in
establishing at UCLA in 1966.

But if there is some doubt about when and how the term 'observational
cinema' originated, there is also, some thirty or so years later, some
continuing doubt about what it actually means. Today the term
'observational cinema' has become a Humpty Dumpty sort of word which
can mean just about anything its user wants it to mean. To my dismay,
despite all my efforts to the contrary, some of my students managed to
reach the end of my introductory course on Visual Anthropology this year
believing that Margaret Mead, with her eccentric vision of a static 360
degree camera on a pole in the middle of a village, was an early proponent
of 'observational cinema'! But if some of these novices remained confused,
this is not surprising because a wide range of different documentary
approaches have, at various times and places, become associated with the
term.

Observational cinema is assumed by some authors to be merely

synonymous with those two other approaches which also emerged, albeit a
few years previously, on the back of the new lightweight synchronous
                                                 
1
This article grew out of a presentation given at Putting the Past Together: the
Origins of Visual Anthropology, a conference organised by Beate Engelbrecht and her
colleagues at the IWF Göttingen
  3

technology, namely, cinéma-vérité as practised by Jean Rouch and his

associates in France and West Africa, and Direct Cinema, as exemplified
by the work of Richard Leacock, D.A.Pennebaker, the Maysles and others
in North America. But there are other commentators, amongst whom I
would include myself, who think that there are significant differences
between all these various approaches, or at least there were, when all of
them were new.

By the mid-1970s, the term 'observational cinema' had become associated

with certain forms of documentary on British television. Initially it was
used to describe the work of directors such as Roger Graef, whose
approach certainly bears strong affinities to that advocated by Colin and
his associates. But gradually it came to be applied to the work of other
documentarists who might have cut in a few hand-held sequences here and
there, but whose films were essentially structured around a series of
interviews, a device which was regarded as anathema by the early
observational fundamentalists trained at UCLA. Nowadays, in television
circles, the term can be used of almost any documentary that is not entirely
based on either dramatic reconstruction or self-conscious performance.

If truth be told, even those close to the fountainhead use the term in a
somewhat ambiguous way. David and Judith MacDougall are routinely
identified, even by themselves, as observational film-makers. Indeed, many
would regard them as the most distinguished exponents of the approach.
And yet, over twenty five years ago, David was distancing himself from
observational cinema in print and urging us to go beyond it.2

What then is observational cinema, exactly? If the spirit of a thing is best

captured at its origins, then surely there is no one better placed to tell us
than Colin Young himself. This was therefore one of the main themes of
the conversation - I'm carefully avoiding the term 'interview' here - that I
recorded with Colin at his home in Kent in April 2001. How did
observational cinema define itself in relation to other approaches
developing in the ferment of the 1960s and 1970s? What cross-fertilization
was there, what points of difference?

This was not the first such conversation we had had, formal or informal:
there had been many unrecorded informal conversations with Colin whilst
I was learning documentary film-making at the National Film and
                                                 
2
See David MacDougall, 'Beyond Observational Cinema' in Paul Hockings, ed., The
Principles of Visual Anthropology, pp.109-124. The Hague: Mouton.
  4

Television School at Beaconsfield in the mid-1980s. In January 1988,

shortly after I had been appointed as Director of the Granada Centre, I
recorded my first formal conversation with Colin. Confronted with a
similar prospect of growing an oak from an acorn, I wanted to know how
he had managed to build up such an ambitious programme at UCLA. "By
theft" was his succinct reply. By theft? "By stealing people, resources and
time from wherever we could across the campus". It has proved most
useful advice - though I'm not saying how - but now in this second
recorded conversation, some thirteen years later, I wanted to know more
precisely whom he had co-opted to the task and in what way. To help in
this enquiry, Colin kindly allowed me to copy some documents from his
personal archive relating to those early days at UCLA.

The first part of this report on our conversation will therefore be a sort of
historical synopsis, based on a synthesis of those documents and Colin's
own comments. This will provide us with a temporal framework within
which to locate the steady stream of people and projects which whirled
around Colin at UCLA in the late 1960s and whose names will crop up
again in the more verbatim second part of the report.

Background to a conversation

Even before entering into this historical background, there is a particularly

enigmatic puzzle to be considered, that is, why has Colin dedicated so
much time and energy to the marriage of film and anthropology? After all,
he had never studied anthropology nor carried out fieldwork in some
culturally exotic location. He was not even an engineer, which by custom
and practice was one of best preparations for anthropological film-makers
in the early days. How was it then that Colin, neither anthropologist nor
documentarist, came to write the essay that is surely the locus classicus for
those seeking a formulation of the precepts of observational cinema, i.e. his
contribution to Principles of Visual Anthropology?3

As Colin relates it, his first involvement with anthropology was entirely
fortuitous. He studied philosophy at the ancient university of St. Andrews
on the eastern seaboard of Scotland, and would have continued to a
                                                 
3
See Paul Hockings, ed., op.cit. pp.65-79. Also reproduced in Roger Crittenden &
Cherry Potters, eds., Confronting Reality: some perspectives on documentary, a special
edition of the CILECT Review, vol.2, no. 1, pp.69-79.
  5

doctorate there but for a disenchanting encounter with academic chicanery.

After a short spell reviewing films for, of all things, The Farmers' Weekly
in Aberdeen, he set sail for the States. Following a mid-Atlantic revelation,
he abandoned all further plans to study philosophy and enrolled instead on
the MA in Theatre Arts at UCLA for the years 1952-1954. He worked in a
various capacities in the film industry after graduation, but mostly in
feature film production, before returning to UCLA to take up an academic
post in the late 1950s. By 1965, he had not only become a full Professor of
Theatre Arts, but had even become - at the dauntingly young age of 38 -
Dean of the whole Department, which comprised Television and Theatre,
as well as Film. Amongst those whom he was supposed to direct were
many of his former teachers.

It was shortly afterwards that Colin had his damascene encounter with
anthropology. This took the form of meeting Edmund Carpenter, along
with a number of other colleagues in the social sciences departments. In
early 1966, he was invited by UNESCO to collaborate with Carpenter in
the production of a report on North American ethnographic films about the
Pacific region. How he came to be invited to do this, given that he had no
anthropology track-record, Colin does not remember. But the invitation
emanated from Enrico Fulchignoni, friend and interlocutor of Jean Rouch.
Colin thinks that he had probably met Rouch a couple of years before at a
Flaherty seminar, and he imagines that it was Rouch who had
recommended him to Fulchignoni.

This encounter with ethnographic film allowed Colin to explore an interest

in people in a way that had simply not been possible in his previous work,
either as philosopher or film-maker. It is this that seems to be the key as to
why Colin should have laboured so mightily to bring film and
anthropology together:

I suspect that there was a gap somewhere in my own mind and in my

character which I was having to confront. That's part of an answer. But the
other is that I found these colleagues in the social sciences extremely
attractive. Ted Carpenter was a real cowboy at a very high level of
intellectual adventurism. He was publishing at the time We are What We
Behold, which I found extraordinarily engaging. But he also seemed to
have serious reservations about anthropology, which intrigued me.
Certainly, he was not well regarded by many UCLA anthropology
colleagues. But I found all these colleagues good company, good to
explore ideas with. I found it rewarding both intellectually and
emotionally.
  6

His fascination with the world of ethnographic film and its denizens took
another turn when Colin attended the UNESCO conference in Sydney in
1966 at which he presented the report he had prepared with Carpenter. It
was there that he became aware how diverse the inhabitants of this world
were. There was Rouch for whom the history of ethnographic film was
Flaherty and a succession of francophone film-makers whom no one else
there had ever heard of. There was also Robert Gardner, whose Dead Birds
excited admiration amongst some but questions about its authenticity
amongst others, especially when certain "dead" warriors were seen by
some to be breathing4. There too were Ian Dunlop and Roger Sandall, both
engaged in forms of salvage ethnographic film-making amongst Australian
Aborigines.

As Colin recalls it, there were a number of dominant themes at the

conference. One of them had to do with the autonomy of the subject. What
rights did they have? The issue was given a particular piquancy by the fact
that the conference was taking place at a time when the political movement
for the recognition of Aboriginal rights over land and other resources was
just beginning. This assertion of Aboriginal identity also extended to a
claim to control the images taken of them, and the use to which they were
put. Although there were no Aborigines present at the UNESCO
conference, this led to a request that all the European women present be
excluded from the screening of a number of films about certain rites which
according to Aboriginal custom should be witnessed by men alone. This
caused what Colin refers to as a "kerfuffle" because it conflicted with an
emergent European gender politics, but in the end, the women all left.

Another theme that was the subject of lively debate was the question as to
what extent the aesthetic requirements of cinema should be allowed to
impact on the film-making of anthropologists. Did such cinematic
conventions distort or enhance the anthropological film? The
anthropologists present were very "huffy" about that in Colin's view,
particularly in relation to Dead Birds. "Gardner", he recalls, "came under a
lot of pressure. But he's very patrician, and nothing if not suave. It was
water off a duck's back. He defended himself very energetically".

Stimulated by the debate between the various different parties at Sydney,

Colin returned home via the Bishop Price Museum in Honolulu. Once back
at UCLA, he started thieving. That is, he entered into alliances with a
number of gate-keepers in other departments and with their support
                                                 
4  At  the  Origins  conference,  that  this  perception  had  any  foundation  in  fact  was  vigorously 
rejected by Karl Heider who acted as consultant anthropologist on Dead Birds. 
  7

assembled the resources to put on an ethnographic film programme. These

allies included the directors of African Studies and of Latin American
Studies, the latter being Johannes Wilbert, the distinguished cultural
anthropologist who had been working with the Warao of the Orinoco Delta
since the 1950s. They also included Mantle Hood, who headed up the
ethnomusicology and ethnic dance programme in the Department of
Music. But perhaps most importantly of all, Colin managed to co-opt
Walter Goldschmidt, then head of the Anthropology Department. Together
they devised a pilot interdisciplinary training programme in ethnographic
film to begin in the Fall of 1966. It was to be taught by themselves and
Richard Hawkins, one of Colin's colleagues in Theatre Arts. The general
idea was that the film-makers would teach anthropologists about film-
making and anthropologists would teach film-makers about anthropology.

In a letter to the University Chancellor, Franklin D. Murphy, written the

following August, Colin reports back on the experience. The seminar was
attended by 25 graduate students, as well as several faculty members
including Harold Garfinkel of Sociology and Paul Hockings from
Anthropology. Visiting film-makers included Robert Gardner, John Adair
(who had only recently carried out his ground-breaking work with Sol
Worth amongst the Navajo) and Edmund Carpenter. At the end of the
seminar, six students were selected (three from Motion Pictures, two from
Ethnomusicology, one from Anthropology) to be given technical training
based around a number of local projects on ethnographic subjects.

At the end of the academic year, in the summer vacation, two more
substantial projects, involving both staff and students had been launched.
One of these was the project that would produce The Village, directed by
Mark McCarty from Motion Pictures and Paul Hockings with the
assistance of two students from the ethnographic film training programme.
In the letter to Chancellor Murphy, Colin describes this as being a project
about "an interesting example of acculturation - the attempt of Irish
officials to transform the last ten tenants of a tiny island called Blaskett
into mainland peasants". Originally, it was budgeted at $19,000 for half
hour black and white film.

The other project, budgeted at $35,000 was to produce an hour long film in
colour about the annual pilgrimage associated with the La Tirana Virgin
Mary cult in the town of Iquique, northern Chile. This project involved
close collaboration with a Chilean ethnomusicology institute. The UCLA
team comprised Donn Borcherdt, a doctoral candidate from
ethnomusicology as well as three students from the training programme.
The producer was Richard Hawkins, but the film director was a Chilean
  8

associated with the ethnomusicology institute. Colin himself went to Chile

to negotiate the relationship with the institute, though he never went on
location in Iquique.

Both the nature of the subject matter and the approach of the respective
directors would account for significant differences in the results between
the two projects. In his letter to Chancellor Murphy, Colin explains that the
Irish project, still on-going at the time of writing, would be "in the style of
so-called direct cinema, or cinema verite, where the director interferes as
little as possible with the material, disciplining himself to record as
accurately as possible a small, intimate situation". In contrast, the La
Tirana project, which would record a procession of 50,000 people, would
be a grand spectacle. The filming would be closely controlled by the
director, and would involve co-ordination between a number of different
film crews, each recording a distinctive aspect of the event.

The two projects had very different outcomes. The Village, with an
eventual running time of 70 minutes has become a classic of
anthropological cinema. For a while, Colin now recalls, he also had hopes
that La Tirana could also make an original contribution to the canon, albeit
in a very different way. He had visited Expo 67 in Montreal and had seen
early examples of split-screen technology. He had the idea that this could
be used for the La Tirana film, with the different parts of the screen
representing different aspects of the cult as recorded by the various
different camera crews. Colin thought that this could be an interesting way
to explore the idea that a film need not have a single, unitary meaning as
relayed from the perspective imposed by the director, but rather could have
a variety of meanings depending on which of the various perspectives
presented on the split-screen that an audience might wish to pursue.
However this ambitious project was never properly completed and exists
only in what Colin now refers to as "a highly bowdlerized version".

However, the pilot project having been deemed a success, it was proposed
that the ethnographic film-training programme should run again in the
academic year 1967-68. Richard Hawkins would again take on one of the
teaching roles, but this time around, Paul Hockings and Mark McCarty,
fresh from their experience in Ireland, would replace Walter Goldschmidt
and Colin himself as the other two principal teachers. In his letter to
Chancellor Murphy, Colin expresses the hope that in the second instalment
of the programme there would be "better connection between film training
and the special anthropological training which was, quite frankly, missing
this year".
  9

In fact, it seems that right from the beginning there was a certain tension
between Colin's views about the programme and those of the
anthropologists. Even whilst collecting data for the UNESCO project,
Colin had been struck by what he saw as a curious paradox about
anthropologists' general attitudes to film. On the one hand, he found that
they were, as he put it, "over-optimistic about what film could do for
them", i.e. that it could be used as sort of scientifically objective recording
medium. On the other hand, they didn't actually seem to be all that
interested in using this medium despite its supposed virtues.

Reading the documents of the time, one cannot help but feel a certain
mismatch of epistemologies, even if both parties conspired to ignore this
fact in the interest of promoting what they had in common. For example,
both agreed that the new technology was a great asset to the kind of film-
making that they sought to promote because it minimized the degree of
intrusion that the act of making films normally entailed. For Colin and his
associates, the advantage of this lack of disturbance was that it permitted a
greater degree of subjective engagement on the part of the film-maker with
his or her subject. For the anthropologists, on the other hand, the advantage
was rather that it enabled a more objective, supposedly scientific form of
film-making. As Walter Goldschmidt himself was wont to put it, this new
technology would allow films to be made of people acting exactly as they
would have been had the camera not been there. This view is routinely
quoted by Colin's protegées as exemplifying an approach that they
regarded as the antithesis of what they were trying to do.5

A similar mismatch is evident in their respective attitudes towards issues of

authenticity. The pre-announcement for the programme states that "there is
general agreement that recording primitive cultures will be possible only
for another decade at most". Indeed this supposed fact provides one of the
rationales for the establishment of the programme as a whole because the
document goes on to add that "UCLA hopes to do some of this work". It is
difficult to see that the film-makers would have been responsible for such
"salvage" attitudes. Certainly it is quite different to the strategy that would
later be employed in The Village when McCarty and Hockings quite self-
consciously chose not to "shoot around" the English tourists who might
have been thought to have undermined some authentic ideal typical vision
of traditional life on the Dingle peninsula.

                                                 
5
See, for example, David MacDougall in his essay, 'Beyond Observational Cinema',
cited above.
  10

Later these tensions would erupt in a tumultuous screening of The Village

at the American Anthropological Association meeting at Seattle in 1968.
But as the second instalment of the programme started in autumn of 1967,
they remained latent. Instead the minds of Colin and his associates were
focused on the major film colloquium which was due to take place in
April. Initially, a major feature of the colloquium was to be the screening
of films about Australian Aborigines, an 11-hour selection of which were
then being toured around the States by Ian Dunlop and his "scientific
adviser" on Desert People, Robert Tonkinson, who was teaching at the
University of Oregon at the time. It also happened that the early Australian
ethnographic film pioneer, Norman Tindale, who had been Curator of the
South Australian Museum from 1928 until his retirement in 1965 was due
to be on a visiting fellowship in Los Angeles.

But in the event, Tindale did not take part and although Ian Dunlop showed
material from Baldwin Spencer's time to the present day, the Australian
component was more than matched by contributions of other kinds. In fact,
the catalogue of participants reads like of a roll-call of the founding figures
of post-war ethnographic film-making. They included Asen Balikci who
showed Netsilik material, John Collier and David Peri who showed The
Sucking Doctor; John Adair presented material on the Navajo, Jean Rouch
and Monique Salzman showed Jaguar and La Goumbé des Jeunes
Noceurs, both then only recently completed; Karl Heider showed his film
on Dani housebuilding; Tim Asch and John Marshall showed a number of
the Bushmen films including Argument about a Marriage and Joking
Relationship; Alan Lomax presented his choreometrics; Hawkins and also
McCarty and Hockings promised "multi-screen presentations" based on
their work in Chile and Ireland respectively; Michel Brault showed Pour la
suite du monde.

The colloquium also included a seminar on the Ethics and Aesthetics of

Ethnographic Film at which Richard Leacock's Happy Mothers' Day was
shown along with the version re-edited by ABC to sell baby food. Other
films included Titticut Folies, Holy Ghost People, Song of Ceylon, and
Pierre Gaisseau's material on the Masai. Edmund Carpenter showed
material shot by patients of a Swiss mental hospital. The colloquium ended
with a session on training and the screening of UCLA student work.
Amongst these students were David and Judith MacDougall who screened
a film that they had made about Native Americans in Los Angeles.

The colloquium not only gave great impetus to the film programme, but
also generated a series of ambitious ideas for future development. First of
all, the colloquium would become a biennial event, and a movable feast,
  11

passing from one film-friendly institution to another around the States.

There was talk of establishing an inter-institutional Ethnographic Film
Center, with four principal collaborators: UCLA, Harvard, Montréal and
the Smithsonian, which would provide archival support. Johannes Wilbert
and the Latin American Studies Center came up with the idea of an
experimental text-book involving a filmic component about the indigenous
cultures of South America, all supposedly threatened with disappearance.

Meanwhile, in collaboration with colleagues in the African Studies Center,

Colin proposed the establishment of five regional ethnographic film
centres. In the first year, the UCLA programme would send a mixed team
of faculty and students to Uganda where they would work in collaboration
with local students and staff at Makerere University for a year, and provide
training to the latter as appropriate. Then the following year, the progamme
would move on to Nigeria, and develop a similar project there, and so on
with three other countries in Africa over a total period of five years.

In the event, only the first and last of these projects would see the light of
day, and then only partially and only for a limited period. Even by the
standards of the time, the budgets involved were very large - the African
regional centres idea was budgeted at an annual rate of $100,000, for
example - and not surprisingly perhaps, they proved difficult to raise. A
second colloquium was indeed held and it took place at New York
University in 1970 under the general direction of the distinguished British
Africanist, John Middleton. Thereafter it was taken over by Jay Ruby at
Temple, where it flourished for a number of years but eventually proved
impossible to sustain on a permanent basis.

Similarly, the African regional centres idea did indeed get going in the
very same year as the colloquium itself when, in the summer vacation of
1968, Richard Hawkins went to Uganda with David and Judith
MacDougall, and a third student, Jack Reed. Together they made a film
with the British anthropologist Suzette Heald, then affiliated to Makerere.
This was Imbalu, and concerned initiation amongst the Gisu with whom
Heald had carried out extended fieldwork. It was directed by Hawkins,
with the MacDougalls each shooting a part and Reed acting as the sound
recordist.6 But although the MacDougalls stayed on in East Africa to carry
out their work amongst the Jie and later amongst the Turkana, the idea of
the regional centre itself never took root in Makerere, nor indeed
anywhere else in Africa.
                                                 
6
See Anna Grimshaw & Nikos Papastergiadis, Conversations with Film-Makers:
David MacDougall, Prickly Pear Press Pamphlet no.9, p.19.
  12

Back in Los Angeles, the film training programme entered its third year in
the academic year 1968-69. Herb di Gioia and David Hancock were
students of Theatre Arts around this time, but they made ethnographic
films in Vermont, di Gioia's own home patch, without an anthropologist.
Another satellite of the programme around this time was Jorge Preloran,
who made a film about the Warao with the support of Johannes Wilbert.
However, as Colin recalls it, Preloran was not deeply involved in the
ethnographic film training programme itself. He did not like working in the
observational manner, being more attracted to Robert Gardner's approach.
  13

There was also "a whole travelling circus of people", to use Colin's phrase,
developing at Rice University in Houston around this time. The leading
light was James Blue who had trained at the University of Oregon and at
IDHEC in Paris and had later taught at UCLA. He began to direct the
programme at Rice from 1969 when a wealthy French family, the De
Menils, put up the funds to start a Media Centre. The specific aim of the
programme was to teach people in other fields how film could be useful to
them - architects, teachers and so on. Blue persuaded Colin to come and
teach there as a commuter from Los Angeles. Later David MacDougall
would also teach there, and when he left, his place was taken by Roger
Sandall. Mark McCarty also taught there for a period.

In 1970, Colin left Los Angeles and came to Britain to set up the National
Film (and later, Television) School. Without his hand on the tiller, the
ethnographic film training programme back at UCLA died a quiet death.
The Masters progamme in ethnographic film towards which he had been
working never happened. But from his new position at Beaconsfield, he
continued to promote ethnographic film, and to keep in contact with his
former associates in Los Angeles. David MacDougall came to Britain to
seek Colin's advice on the final cut of To Live with Herds, which was the
film that MacDougall presented for his Master of Fine Arts degree. Colin
continued to commute back to Houston to teach at Rice for a week at a
time. Students he met at Rice were later recruited to Beaconsfield.

Not long after he arrived at Beaconsfield, the American Universities Field

Staffs progamme provided an institutional vehicle to keep these States-side
connections going. Colin persuaded Norman Miller, the producer whose
brainchild it was, to produce the whole series out of Beaconsfield. As
Miller was also being courted very powerfully by the Canadian National
Film Board at the time, this was a remarkable coup. The AUFS project
hired a number of people associated with the UCLA programme:
MacDougall and Blue went to film the Kenya Boran with the Manchester
anthropologist Paul Baxter, di Gioia and Hancock went to Afghanistan
with Louis Dupree. Two films on Chinese subjects were made by Richard
Chan. He had also been at UCLA, though being more of a feature film
director, he had not been directly involved in the ethnographic film training
programme.

As he became more established at Beaconsfield, Colin started thieving

again, using the NFTS's resources to support European ethnographic film-
making activities. For example, in the early 1980s, he supported French
anthropologist Colette Piault, and her perambulating seminar, the Regards
sur les Sociétés Européennes. He also arranged for her to work with a
  14

talented young student cameraman from the NFTS, Graham Johnson, with
whom she made a number of films in her fieldwork area in northern
Greece. Colin also became a regular visitor to the Musée de l'Homme,
participating in Rouch's Bilan Ethnographique and in his Regards
Comparés. He also participated in the Nordic Anthropological Film
Association seminars. But perhaps the most systematic project he was
involved in was the training programme he developed in conjunction with
the Film Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute with the aid of
funding from the Leverhulme Trust. This was a sort of reprise of the
UCLA initiative, bringing anthropologists and film-makers together as
students under the guidance of Herb di Gioia whom he had by then
appointed to run the documentary department. The scheme ran from 1984
to 1987, and I was one of four very fortunate beneficiaries of it7.

And that was how this conversation first began.

A Conversation

PH: Some 35 years after the Sydney meeting, most anthropologists who
have thought seriously about the matter would probably now recognise
that film cannot be absolutely objective, but they would still have
reservations about surrendering entirely to cinematic conventions and,
say, using Hollywood narrative devices.

CY: I think they are right to have those reservations. Yet there are some
film-makers, such as Robert Gardner, who revel in them, as in Forest of
Bliss, for example. There is not the slightest doubt in his mind that his
strategy is the right one. He may change the detail, but he's not worried
because he thinks he's making a film that is truthful in a much more
interesting way.

PH: You wouldn't agree with that?

                                                 
7
The others were the ethnomusicologist John Baily, who now teaches at Goldsmith's
College, University of London, Marcus Banks who teaches at the Institute of Social and
Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford, and Felicia Hughes-Freeland who
teaches at the University of Swansea. As a sort of further extension of the scheme, we
were able to arrange with Colin and Herb di Gioia for my then newly-appointed
colleague at the Granada Centre, Anna Grimshaw, to attend the School for two terms in
the academic year 1991-1992. However she was actually funded by the Granada Centre
and the University of Manchester rather than by the RAI/Leverhulme Trust.
  15

CY: I find it resistible because I also find the ordinary everyday event
fascinating. I have an enormous patience for detail, provided I believe what
I'm seeing or hearing.

PH: This immediately raises one of the main issues I would like to address,
namely, how you would situate observational cinema in relation to what
the Direct Cinema group were doing, on the one hand, and, on the other,
what Rouch was doing. When the Direct Cinema people were working for
Drew Associates and producing films for television, they got round the
problem of how to structure their material by choosing topics that had the
so-called ‘crisis structure’ within them: elections, court cases, political
crises and so on. So they didn't have to worry about dramatic shaping of
the material, because the events themselves already had it. And apart from
Chronicle of a Summer, which is a sort of hybrid work, involving a number
of different authors, Rouch doesn't generally make films about everyday
life. His films are dominated by issues of performance, either by himself,
and/or by the people in front of the lens. In contrast, this interest in detail,
and in everyday life seems to be absolutely central to your conception of
observational cinema.

CY: It's not just that everyone deserves their fifteen minutes of fame, as
Warhol suggested. Rather there is a grandeur to the images that Flaherty
produced of everyday life, from Nanook on. There's a grandeur about the
images that Balikci produced of the Netsilik. It's difficult to replicate this in
the context of urban society but it's still there. It is wonderfully
demonstrated in Gary Kildea's film Celso and Cora. These are people
whose lives are close to being sordid, but when sympathetically treated, as
in that film, they can be shown to be grand. This is one of the things that
cinema can celebrate, which you can't find in a newspaper or in a scholarly
treatment. You can only appreciate this grandeur by being a witness to it.
And, properly employed, film can make that possible. I don't mean by
making another life exotic but by knowing how to be close to what is
actually happening in that other person's life. Not by romancing it. My
difficulty with Gardner is that he romances his subjects' lives.

PH: But wasn't Flaherty also romancing them?

CY: But that pointed us in a certain direction. He did oversimplify the

crises in people's lives. There are all sorts of stories about how truthful that
walrus hunt is. Not very, probably. But he allowed us to see that if you take
a person like Nanook and turn him into a character, you don't have to do
too much work to make that as interesting as something in a John Ford
  16

movie. The difference is not that huge. What conventional cinema leaves
out is the ordinary behaviour of so-called ‘ordinary’ people.

PH: But what do you think it was about your personal vision or the people
around you that encouraged you to take an interest in the everyday? I'm
trying to make the case that it's different in this regard from both Rouch
and the North American Direct Cinema people. One of the people who
pops up in the accounts of your early days at UCLA is Harold Garfinkel.
To me, there's a seeming sympathy between his kind of sociology, as the
study of the minute processes of everyday life, and your approach to
cinema. Was it just a coincidence of kindred spirits, or was there some
mutual intellectual fertilization going on there?

CY: Well, Harold had no interest at all in the technical side of what we
were doing. What he was absolutely focused on was the fact that we would
show things through our films that traditional anthropologists would be
maddened by because their methodologies weren't capable of achieving
these outcomes. So when he was advising us around the time of the
making of The Village, he confirmed in our mind that if we were careful in
how we approached subject matter and people, and if we trusted them in
regard to what other people would find interesting, the amount of
manipulation that we would have to do with the material was very little. So
that was an aesthetic or a methodological issue which had to do with
procedure and process. That became a new discipline for us. We had to
discard old tools and develop new ones if we wanted to share our interest
with an audience who would otherwise not find it interesting. The
methodology itself would deliver our shared interest.

PH: But how did you go about advocating this methodology to your
students at the time they were choosing their film subjects? Direct Cinema
chose subjects that lent themselves to narrative forms. Perhaps as many as
eighty or ninety percent of the films that have ever been made in the name
of anthropology have been about rituals, or ceremonials which have their
own intrinsic structure. If they have not been about rituals or ceremonial,
they have been about technical processes or journeys that also have a
beginning, a middle and an end. Were you conscious of the sense that it's
all very well to film everyday life, but where do you begin and where do
you end? Isn't there a way in which you've got to conceive of a film having
a narrative shape even before you begin to film it?

CY: We were discouraged by thinking about it like that ourselves by the

whole propaganda being put up by Frances Flaherty about her husband's
work. She called it "non-preconceptualism". We bought that hook, line and
  17

sinker before asking Ricky Leacock what actually went on in the making
of Louisiana Story.8 Then we had to be much more modest in the way that
we talked about that. Frances was ‘cuckoo’ to some extent by that time and
made her husband even more romantic by denying any manipulation
whatsoever. So we didn't say, ‘Let's get the picture together first’. Instead
we said, ‘Let's be sure we understand the predicaments that the
protagonists find themselves in’. Everyone has predicaments, so it's a
question of discovering what they are. That's to do with building up trust
and intimacy with people. We were giving ourselves assignments on the
assumption that everyone was interesting. But you had to find out what
that interesting thing was. That was an exercise in human relations, not in
film-making as such.

In terms of my philosophical studies, I suspect that the origins of this

approach had something to do with my one-time interest in behaviourism,
which is posited on the assumption that you can understand what motivates
people by observing the way they are behaving externally. I certainly
found that assumption to be a permanent part of the conversation we were
having about film making at that time. We were looking for what Steve
Morrison would later call soap opera rather than soap box ways of
exploring everyday lives.9 The soap opera phenomenon demonstrated that
everyday lives, if properly explored, represented and distributed could be
meaningful and interesting to large numbers of people.

PH: There is a view with regard to philosophical currents of the time - and
here I should add that I'm completely out of my depth - that the interest in
the 1950s developing around language and its use in everyday life as a
means of creating a meaningful world had a kind of resonance with the
ideas of Direct Cinema. Until you had synch sound, there was no way in
which film could show how language and its everyday usage actually
created social worlds. In this view, Direct Cinema wasn't something that
suddenly emerged due to the fortuitous invention of a new technology.

                                                 
8
Leacock acted as cameraman on this, Flaherty's last major film. See his account, 'The
making of Louisiana Story' in Crittenden and Potter, eds., op.cit. pp.5-9.
9
Steve Morrison trained at the National Film and Television School in the early
1970s, later becoming a senior executive of the Granada Media Group until he was
ousted in a recent ‘boardroom coup’
  18

Rather the technology came into existence in order to meet a need for this
way of understanding the world.10 Do you have a view on that?

CY: I would tend to agree with most of that. But it doesn't take me quite
far enough in remembering why we did it. We were all film buffs, who
knew and loved the history of cinema and the way that it had developed. I
can imagine that one day we had a conversation to the effect that wouldn't
it have been fascinating if the Lumière brothers had had synch sound when
they were photographing their workers coming out of the factory. One of
the images to ourselves was that we were taking cinema back to that early
point with this new capability and seeing where it led us. And one of things
that we discovered was that it took us closer and closer to Lumière and
further and further away from Méliès. There was that clear demarcation in
our minds from the very beginning. We didn't direct people, therefore we
didn't manipulate the subject in that obvious way to explore it. We just
allowed it to evolve.

When the MacDougalls first came to me with their cut of To Live with
Herds, it still depended on narration read in the wonderful voice of James
Blue. We realised that this was interfering with learning who the Jie were.
It told us things about them that were interesting to know, but we were not
actually learning who they were. So the decision was taken to drop James
Blue's wonderful narration. We then went up to the Hebrides for a few
days armed with file cards with all the different scenes outlined on them
and began re-arranging the structure. We were looking for ways of
communicating who these people were without using narration. It was that
which led to the first use of subtitles.11

PH: But what was this narration actually saying? Was it ethnographic
explanation?

                                                 
10
Though he approaches the matter from a somewhat different angle, I had in mind
here the arguments of William Rothman in his Documentary Film Classics, Cambridge
University Press, 1997, pp.109-111.

  Colin appears to be mistaken on the primacy of this use of subtitles. To Live with Herds was 
11

not released until 1971 whereas subtitles had been used in ethnographic films at least as far 
back as John Marshall’s film A Joking Relationship, released in 1962. 
  19

CY: It was stuff that was hard to lose often because it was things the
MacDougalls knew to be the case. There were a couple of times when
some very interesting things were being said, such as how the newly-dug
water wells were actually destroying the grazing habits of the cattle. And
how the introduction of taxation put the Jie in a dilemma because the only
way that they could come up with the money was to sell some of their
cows. One man couldn't decide which cow of two to sell, but then whilst
he was deciding one of them died. It was very difficult when they knew
something about a character not to include it in the film. So on a couple of
occasions, they put the narration back in again. There was one sequence
very late in the film where they decided they just had to use narration.
Then it came in as quite a shock. So they decided to go back and put a bit
of narration in earlier so that the rules of the game didn't change.

These were early attempts to do without the voice of the third party. This
didn't change until we realized that there was something called participant-
observation. Then we became aware that if the filmmaker could be
introduced to the audience as being a participant, then there would be a
way, stylistically, of including the film-maker's voice in the film.

PH: This was quite different from the Leacock-Maysles-Pennebaker

approach. As I understand it, they made it an article of faith that you didn't
interfere in any way. You didn't speak unless spoken to. In fact, I suspect it
was an article of faith more honoured in the breach than honoured. But it
must have marked you out as being distinctive.

CY: The question of the invisible observer behind the camera was always
dodgy because he's not invisible to the people being filmed. The reason
why the expression 'fly on the wall' was sneered at by us was because there
ain't no fly on the wall that is capable of holding an Éclair (16mm camera).
It's also deceitful to suggest that being observed does not change you. So it
was much more useful to admit to being there right from the start. If that
changed you into a dummy that was probably also deceitful because when
the camera wasn't running you were probably chatting away. There was a
kind of 'holier than thou' side to cinema-vérité which we were very
suspicious of. Just in its title. I'm going right back to kinopravda now. That
term 'pravda' was bullshit. It led to a misguided discussion about what was
being attempted. Direct Cinema avoided that by its choice of language.
Rouch could escape it by saying that he was producing cinéma-direct.
  20

PH: There is a whole confused history about those terms which perhaps we
had better avoid. Everybody seems to be using cinema-vérité in his or her
own way.

CY: We used the word 'observational' because we wanted to describe a

process rather than a promise.

PH: When did this word actually become a matter of common currency
amongst you?

CY: In the middle of an argument with Roger Sandall at Rice University

because he thought he had invented the word, and we said, ‘No, no, we had
invented it’. Sometime after that, after my return to Britain, people such as
Leslie Woodhead and his mates at Granada Television were also very
happy to use this word, because it also described one of their ambitions.
They were looking closely at something. So through that television
population, it became more and more general.

PH: Now it seems to have lost its specificity: all sorts of people are
claiming to do observational cinema. It's become more or less any kind of
documentary that doesn't have a commentary on it, or interviews that are
not too prominent. But I'm interested in the original circumstances in
which you phrased it. It's interesting that you took the most celebrated
oxymoron in anthropology, participant-observation, and chose the
observation rather than the participation side. Yet you had always stressed
the importance of the subjectivity of the film-maker in engaging in human
relation terms with the subjects, you were always going on about the
importance of participation in that sense. So why did you opt for the
observation?

CY: I personally didn't encounter the ‘participation’ part until much later.
That became a useful term to deflect arguments against observational
filming on the grounds that we were apparently claiming more than we
could deliver. But we didn't make these promises in our teaching or in the
films that we actually made. The word ‘participant’ came in as a useful
instrument in that discussion.

The time when the language of observational cinema came in for the most
severe criticisms was probably in the colloquium that David and Judith
organized in Canberra some ten years after the UCLA one in 1978. The
writer James Roy McBean took the view that the films we were making
were deceitful by promising that ‘this is how it really was, folks’. In
comparison, he thought that something that was clearly manipulated was
  21

more honest. It astonished me, as it astonished James Blue, that anyone

could say that. Participation became a useful means of defence against that
kind of criticism.

In Peter and Jane Flint, that lovely film that di Gioia and Hancock made in
Vermont, they were having conversations with that young couple all the
time. If you want to call that ‘participant-observation’, you can do so. In
the Turkana material, where David and Judith are having conversations, it's
another way of telling an audience how the film was made. They also
showed how these conversations could be used as a source of information,
which was something which we found more and more necessary as
observational cinema progressed. It wasn't a change of film-making
strategy as such, but more a change of tactics in dealing with the enemy.
But we still held firmly to the view that the total fictionalisation of material
was not necessary to make it interesting.

PH: There's a point you've made before that's relevant here, which is to do
with the disparity between filming observationally and remaining faithful
to it when you get back in the edit suite. Why is it so important?

CY: It occurred to us that if you tried to approach the subject matter

differently in the shooting, it was a pity to depart from that in the editing. It
would conceal your methods from the audience. Here's where Garfinkel
feeds back in: he made us aware that however we did things, there was a
methodology involved. What were trying to do was reveal our
methodology to an audience, so that it could evaluate the film without
having to be experts in the subject matter. I found that a very useful
contribution to our discussions. It encouraged us to choose our subjects in
such a way that they didn't have to be betrayed in the edit suite.

PH: Can you tell me as a matter of record, what kind of relationships you
had with the Direct Cinema group?

CY: Leacock and Pennebaker became friends, so we were with each other
whenever we could be. I thought their films were wonderful. I admired
their agility and their energy. But also the high morality in their films.
They were also extremely entertaining customers. Pleasure was an
important part of the relationship. I'm not sure what they thought we were
up to in UCLA. But they came to visit us there, also in Beaconsfield. Not
quite yet in this house, though occasionally I get these wild 'phone calls.

PH: Were there any dissonances that helped to define what you were about
as opposed to what they were doing?
  22

CY: We were aware of the crisis structure aspect of Direct Cinema, which
we accepted as one way of dealing with the problem of how you construct
a film. One of the films of that period that was crucial was Petey and
Johnny, about some rather delinquent characters, edited by another friend
called Patricia Jaffe, who later went on to edit The Thomas Crown Affair.
Right at the end, Robert Drew, the producer, wanted commentary on the
film. It fell to Pat to find a way of constructing the material so that
commentary was not necessary. I was inspired by their resilience under
pressure. That encouraged us to be more resilient about what we were
doing.

What I noticed about Leacock was that whenever he wrote or spoke about
what he was doing, the word ‘observation’ was constantly being used.
That's partly where we got the word from. Although he wasn't doing what
we thought he ought to be doing, we were aware that what he was working
from was observation.

But it wasn't simply a question of being influenced by other kinds of

documentary. It was also a question of being more influenced by Jean
Renoir than by Hitchcock. In Canberra, I remember that Blue showed bits
of La Règle du Jeu to illustrate his own approach to film-making.
Whenever I see Hitchcock's use of dramatic irony illustrated, my skin
bristles with the complete hokey-pokey side of it. You feel that if the
camera were only a few degrees either side, then you'd stop believing it.
But that would never be the same with Renoir, because his style of
narration was built around the expectation that the camera could be
anywhere. So one felt as if there was a life going on regardless of whether
his camera was recording it or not.

PH: you say in your well-known "Observational Cinema" article that the
Italian Neo-realists were your godfathers. I can see that the mise en scène
of Neo-realism is based on a kind of aesthetic in which one would like to
locate observational cinema as well, but isn't their planning of everything
down to the last detail antithetical to what you were trying to do?

CY: But if you take Bicycle Thieves, there is a wonderful sequence near the
beginning where the protagonists have to pawn some sheets to get some
money. So they take them to a warehouse where they will be given some
money for themselves and their family. And then this package is taken
from them and put high up on a shelf. But it has to be passed through a
whole series of people to get up to the place where it has to be stored. And
you suddenly realize how universal the problem is. It's a problem that
  23

affects not just this particular family, but thousands of people who are in
the same predicament. That is an invented sequence, but it is the sort of
sequence that an observational film-maker would give his eye-teeth for. It
is the moment that acts as metaphor for the whole subject. This is
something that we allowed ourselves to be influenced by in selecting what
to shoot and what not to shoot. But it wasn't something that came easily at
all.

David and Judith made a film about American Indians who lived in Los
Angeles. But that was a horrifying experience because they kept on cutting
the camera off just as it was getting interesting because they were short of
money. In order to try and learn what was going wrong, I asked them to
put spacer in every time they cut picture because they had kept running on
the sound as that was much cheaper. We tried to figure out what it was that
made them turn the camera off. In brief, it was because fictional
conventions had determined what made things interesting to us and that
was now interfering with the observation of ordinary behaviour.

There was a time when I was guilty of it myself, when we went out to film
the opening of a supermarket far out in the sticks in East Los Angeles. I
took a whole bunch of students with Super8 to film, not the opening, but
the Indians who would perform for the crowd of people who would be
assembled there. They had also invited a group of handicapped people to
observe it - an act of complete opportunism! A large black limousine
arrived, out of which stepped an Indian who was going to dance. I filmed
the dance but the moment that the dance was finished, I turned the camera
off, instead of continuing to run and get him back into the limousine. So I
missed the most important bit of information, namely that he collapsed
because he was completely shagged at the end. But I had stopped at the
end of the theatrical moment. We were all learning that sort of thing as we
went along. The neo-realist films were particularly useful to us in helping
us to sharpen our powers of observation.

PH: These ideas were developing in UCLA in the late 1960s, and then you
came to Britain in 1970 where you advised on the cutting of To Live with
Herds. Could it be argued that this was the first fully realized work of
observational cinema?

CY: It probably was the first, but that was only because Hawkins was such
a terrible procrastinator that he didn't get La Tirana out first.

PH: I suppose The Village might count as the first fully realized work of
observational cinema?
  24

CY: I think the Jie film was much closer to what we were trying to
achieve. The Village precedes it in time, but it's got its share of editing in it.
For example, the sequence of people leaving Ireland has a heavy hand of
editing in it.

PH: But even in To Live with Herds, as has been commented before, that
final scene has a very classical end of film feel to it.12 The main character
is walking along in late afternoon, as I recall it, with the salutation 'May
you live with herds' being repeated in voice-over. It's one of the few
moments in the film when you don't have synch sound. Even observational
film-makers have to tell stories don't they?

CY: This is the thing that we explored in the discussion in Canberra in

1978. We had no less a compulsion to tell a story than anybody else ever
had. But it always comes back to how you tell that story. When I grew up
and left the NFTS, and began to work for ACE in Paris, we were still
talking about how the subject should be treated. The Americans in their
cinema are so much better on this than we are, on the whole, in Europe.
They've trained an audience to expect the kind of film that they are capable
of making. Our audiences are trained by seeing other films, but there's
always a bridge to be built.

Ethnographic film cannot escape the need to tell a story because that's what
audiences expect. You can't reinvent cinema for this one purpose, at least I
don't think you can. But you can modify it. Not all films have to end like
Chaplin marching off towards the sunset. But you look for some way of
resolving the issues in the life that has been represented using the narrative
conventions that your audience will expect. The narrative conventions
should be adapted to the life rather than vice versa. But they're not
something that can be invented anew for every film that is made.

PH: In ethnographic film-making, the whole question of narrative

conventions seems to be something of a guilty secret. Everybody is using
them, but somehow we never seem to discuss them very much, with the

                                                 
12
, I am referring here to Brian Winston's view, as expressed in his book, Claiming the
Real, British Film Institute, 1995, that the final scene in To Live with Herds proves that
structure always wins out in the end: "Chaplin danced down no sunset-lit road to greater
effect" (p.191).
  25

notable exception of Toni de Bromhead, who has written a whole book on

this matter.13

CY: They are a guilty secret. But I don't think we should be ashamed of
them. As long as we are using film, we must take into account the films
that people are accustomed to seeing before they see our ‘master works’. If
these films are narrative-based, then tant pis, that's what film is because
that's what audiences expect.

It's always been interesting to me that when we made The Village, back
then Hockings thought that he would be crucified for falling under the
influence of Hollywood and McCarty thought he would be crucified for
making a boring movie. When the film was shown in Seattle at the AAA
meeting, it was crucified by the anthropologists for using a methodology
that attacked the ones that they had just graduated with. The critics did
everything they could to prevent the filim from being shown, including
trying to unplug the projector and so on. Both Hockings and McCarty were
in despair. Hockings was more resigned to it than McCarty who felt
completely crushed by the reaction to the film. He was tearing this hair, I
was protecting the projector, Hockings was sitting looking quite bemused
by it all, saying what idiots they were. But in the end, McCarty got a
promotion and Hockings didn't. McCarty's colleagues realised that he had
done something, but Hockings got no respect whatsoever for what he had
done from his colleagues.

PH: What was the methodology that the anthropological critics thought
was so threatened?

CY: Gathering information into baskets and only when you had all the
baskets filled would you be entitled to draw conclusions from your
research. When we limped back to UCLA from Seattle, it was Garfinkel
who came to our rescue by making us realize that what we were doing was
telling these recent PhD graduates that they had wasted their time. "Don't
worry," he said, "they'll get used to it and they'll start to want to use your
tools".

                                                 
13
Toni de Bromhead (1996) Looking Two Ways: documentary film's relationship with
reality and cinema. Hojbjerg/ Intervention Press. See also my article "Narratives: the
guilty secret of ethnographic documentary?", which is due to appear in the festschrift
volume offered in honour of the Dutch visual anthropologist Dirk Nijland and currently
being edited for publication by Metje Postma.
  26

And the future?

So was Garfinkel right? Perhaps the most honest answer is that, even thirty
years later, the jury is still out. In the States particularly, it seems that there
are some who are prepared to declare not only that observational cinema is
dead, but so too is the whole genus of documentary.14 Within
anthropology, even some of the best appear to lack all conviction,
considering film to have no more than a role as a pedagogical medium or
as a means of popularising the discipline.

But this pessimism contrasts with our experience at the Granada Centre
where we were still actively promote the virtues of observational cinema
for particular purposes, even if we also expose our students to other styles
and approaches. The flow of applicants from students with the highest first
degree qualifications in anthropology has been running strongly for more
than a decade. True, many of our graduates chose to take their
anthropological training and apply it in the television industry or other
film-making contexts outside academic institutions. But every year, a
certain proportion take their film-making skills with them as they go on to
doctoral work. In the long run, it will be these students who will create a
place for film-making within the anthropological project as a whole.

Even on the same glorious May afternoon that Colin and I were ruminating
on these matters in his garden, revising the earlier interview, he received a
'phone call from Donn Pennebaker. Pennebaker was full of good news: the
recent film he made with his partner Chris Hegedus, Startup.com had been
very successful in the States and was now being distributed on DVD. He
had a new commission from Miramax, the Disney-owned production
company responsible for many Oscar-winning films. A number of his early
works were being re-issued in a boxed, three-film DVD set. These
included Monterey Pop, which he had even been able to expand and re-
integrate some of the musical performance sequences that he had
reluctantly been obliged to exclude in the 16mm version. "These are
exciting times", Colin reported him as saying,"and the best of times to be
working as a documentarist, better even than the 1960s".

In my view, there are good grounds for optimism about documentary-

making for anthropological purposes too. The technology is cheaper and
                                                 
14
See for example the remarks of Lucien Taylor in his Introduction to David
MacDougall's Transcultural Cinema, Princeton University Press, pp. 3-21.
  27

easier to use than ever before, and the intellectual climate of anthropology
more favourable to the notion of using film, not just as a means of record,
but as a means of representing the experience of cultural difference.15
However, there is a dismaying tendency for discussions about this matter
to get lost between the celebration of a glorious past, such as we shall be
engaging in during this symposium, and prophecies about a utopian future
when new technology will somehow solve all our problems, both
intellectual and practical. But to get from the one to the other, it is
necessary to build a bridge between them through the present. Surely the
best way to do that is by filmic practice, rather than by hoping, by power of
thought alone, to hit upon a respectable theoretical rationale for film-
making in anthropology.

By virtue of a powerful imagination and a determination to overcome

institutional obstacles, coupled with some artful thieving, Colin Young
created the infrastructure in 1960s UCLA for a filmic practice whose
influence continues to expand across the world, like ripples in pond, both
inside and outside the academy. Those of us who have been enriched by
his vision of an observational cinema now have the responsibility to find
new institutional means to put its precepts into practice.

                                                 
15
I have offered a much more extended argument for this view in a recent article:
"Ethnographic film: technology, practice and anthropological theory" Visual
Anthropology 13: 207-228.